In an industrial manufacturing environment, accurate control of the manufacturing process is important. Ineffective process control can lead to costly processing delays due to automation issues or manual interfaces that were not correctly or effectively monitored. Without effective and efficient monitoring, an automated manufacturing facility may experience processing delays caused by a stalled lot or idle or stalled equipment. For example, a factory may have a high priority lot, i.e., a lot that should process without queue time, but due to a process error the high priority lot was left in a previous steps equipment buffer for an extended period of time. In one embodiment, the process error may be due to an automation error. As a result, the factory endured a stalled lot condition. In another example, a factory process may include manual operations to introduce new material into the factory. However, the new material starts may not have occurred because the manual start operation was not being performed.
Typically, production line control manually monitors manufacturing facilities in an isolated environment. The typical workflow for dealing with issues as described above, is that a production line control first identifies issues in a factory and subsequently builds watchdog applications to isolate specific issues. The difficulty with these implementations are many: cost of implementing the watchdogs, an issue must first be identified before the watchdog can be created, a manufacturing facility may possibly require a watchdog application for each issue amounting to hundreds of watchdogs, the cost of ownership and maintenance of these watchdog applications is high, and there may be many issues that are occurring in a factory that are never identified because no watchdog application was created.